But first, 0630 EDT on Saturday the 26th day of October, 2013, was brought to you by the word “Fahrenheit” and the number ’28’. Brrrrrr!
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I got home from work yesterday evening, and found Marcia watching something that probably first appeared on an obtangular Philco Predicta television in the late 1940’s. I threw an ENOTINTERESTED exception, then I came upstairs and started mucking about with the Raspberry Pi. The little credit-card sized computer, named Dortmunder (for REASONS), has languished in a corner for quite a while. I first discovered that my phone life-extension battery (acquired at VMworld, thanks VMUG) also happily powers the Pi:
Pi, fully mobile with battery pack
It’s worth pointing out that the 2200 mAh pack will probably only run the Pi for around 3 hours, since a 10 Ah battery’s been tested out to 15 hours. So, not a LOT of value there, but certainly a momentarily fun test. You can also see the size of the wireless adapter from Edimax, lit blue out of the USB housing at the top of the Pi.
More about Dortmunder: I’d considered buying a case for it pretty much from the day it arrived. I was an early Pi adopter, and at the time of purchase there were only one-off prototype cases spun up on someone’s 3D printer. While that’s cool and all, I didn’t have THAT much of a need for a case. After all, for months Dortmunder hung on a hook in my wiring closet, wired to the switch there.
With the recent addition of that Edimax miniature wireless adapter (see last Sunday’s post), the Pi can now sit comfortably with just a power connection anywhere I want. But the camera, hanging out there at the end of a 14cm ribbon cable, is not trivially stable. Nor is it easy to handle the Pi without risking static damage. So instead of going to Element 14, or Adafruit, or one of the many other Raspberry Pi resources online, I headed down to the woodshop, and noodled for a couple of hours with hand tools and scraps. I came up with this:
Dortmunder’s hobby horse
There’s a couple of tweaks to adjust the operation and positioning of the camera on the “head”. I’d like to be able to get a good angle up (or down) to aim the camera properly. I have to think about that. But the circuit board body is quite firmly stable in the hand-cut grooves in the three wooden uprights. Fun little project, and the inexpensive accessory camera takes really sharp pictures:
Brian snapped by Pi camera
Let’s just assume that’s NOT a halo, mmm’kay? It’s almost certainly the light that sits on top of that cabinet over my right shoulder.
